Film review: France's Slalom carves through the complexity of sexual abuse in women's sports
An assured, thought-provoking film from a director who knows competitive skiing
The Cinematheque streams Slalom from April 9 through 22
CHARLENE FAVIER’S assured first feature Slalom digs unsettlingly at the reasons why sexual abuse is so pervasive in women’s sports.
The French director shows how boundaries dissolve as a body becomes the domain of a coach. Soon after 15-year-old Lyz (newcomer Noée Abita) arrives at ski-training camp, she has to strip down and submit to her male coach weighing her, pinching her abdominal fat with calipers, and interrogating her about her menstrual cycles. On the slopes, while the clock ticks down in the gates, Fred (Jérémie Renier) thinks nothing of rubbing her upper thighs to warm them up.
Add to those first violations his verbal abuse—a fact that’s accepted as integral to succeeding: as Lyz’s teammate tells her "Fred crushes you, you listen, and you get better." The fact she boards alone, unsupervised, in a student residence, her single mother far away at work in Marseille, completes the perfect scenario for a predator.
Clearly director Favier, a skier herself, knows the minute details of the world she’s portraying, She exposes the training regimens that invade every moment of a student’s day, from what they eat to the mental exercises that go on long after the gondolas have stopped at night. It’s also visible in the way she shoots the slopes: the camera schussing breathlessly behind a skiier who speeds around poles, or capturing the dreamlike sunset pink that bathes the French alps. Like winter mountains, there’s both an allure and a danger to the imagery.
Actors Abita and Renier bring nuance to the issues of consent and power dynamics here. On the one hand, Lyz is as strong as graphite, but Abita wordlessly shows how afraid she is of showing fear. When the violations escalate, you can see the shock and disorientation in her eyes—even when her abuser can’t. What feels real here is that she’s in over her head, simultaneously flattered, bewildered, and horrified by what’s happening—a fracturing that Favier captures through increasingly disorienting scenes.
For his part, Renier, a favourite from Dardenne brothers films, slow-reveals all the contradictory facets of her coach. You know this kind of guy, but Favier is careful not to make him a one-note monster: he’s a cocky, aggressive, and magnetic leader, but a selfish man-child fighting his own insecurities around failure, living vicariously through the achievements of the kids he moulds. One of Favier’s most insightful revelations is the way Fred’s biggest turn-on comes when Lyz starts winning races, feeding his ego.
Slalom is disturbing, but necessary at a time when sports from gymnastics to hockey grapple with abuse; Alpine Canada itself has recently faced its own demons. Slalom also joins a strong and provocative array of female-helmed films emerging in this #MeToo era—films like Test Pattern and Violation that show the frustrating grey area of consent and transgression, and the reasons why going to authorities is much more daunting that it sounds.
What makes Slalom especially fascinating, though, is that it is coming out of France, which is having its own, belated #MeToo moment. Note that Lyz is 15, the only recently enacted age of consent after a series of sexual abuse scandals shook the country. Without ever lecturing or offering easy solutions, Favier has shown how—even at that age—the boundaries of personal space, the responsibility of care, and the agency just to say “oui” or “non” can be more perilous than any slalom course.
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